A Quality of Experience (QoE) parameter is a parameter for evaluating a Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of experience of a common user. In an Internet Protocol Television (IPTV) service, channel switching time is an important index that affects the QoE parameter.
The channel switching time refers to the duration of time from a moment that a user sends a channel switching instruction to a moment that the user views a new channel. After the user sends the channel switching instruction to a Set-Top Box (STB), the STB sends a channel switching request to a switching server that provides a channel switching service. After receiving the request of the STB, the switching server responds to the request, and if it is determined to accept the request, provides the user with a fast channel switching service in a unicast or multicast manner (that is, sends a temporary data stream to the user, in which the data stream is obtained by copying an original multicast stream). After the user accesses a switching stream for a certain period of time, a multicast server provides the user with a service of the channel (that is, the multicast server sends the original multicast stream to the user).
During the fast channel switching, switching resource information such as network bandwidth, a server load, switching time of a receiving end, and channel buffer content may change at any time, and such a change may disable the normal fast channel switching service. For example, when the network available bandwidth is reduced or the server load is larger than a preset threshold value, the switching server may directly reject the request after receiving the channel switching request sent by the STB.
In a solution of the prior art, when detecting that the switching resource information does not meet a switching condition, the switching server may reject the channel switching request sent by the STB, but only feed back a rejection message to the STB. The STB may only acquire that the channel switching request is rejected after obtaining the rejection message. Therefore, the STB may not determine how to process after the channel switching request is rejected.
Because the STB may not acquire a specific rejection reason after receiving the rejection message sent by the switching server, the STB may not continue the corresponding processing after the channel switching request is rejected, which therefore affects the channel switching efficiency.
Secondly, in the solution of the prior art, once detecting that the switching resource information does not meet the switching condition (that is, failing to send a data stream obtained by copying an original multicast stream to the STB), the switching server may directly reject the channel switching request of the STB, so that available resources in the switching server may not be fully used, which therefore affects the channel switching efficiency.